This little-known mountain top is a gorgeous spire of rock 2,664 meters high, located southwest of Ameca in the enormous Sierra Verde.

Unless you own a helicopter, you’ll be needing a really tough four-wheel-drive vehicle for this trip, but at the end of two hours of wild bouncing, you get a reward that makes it not only worthwhile, but worth coming back for another look.

We set out at 7 a.m. with me shoehorned into the back seat of my neighbor Miguel’s little Jeep. Things then proceeded in typical Mexican style …

We drove to a remote spot west of Ameca to meet up with Miguel’s friends, who didn’t appear. Back we went to Ameca only to discover we had been waiting at the wrong spot. The amigos were now way ahead of us, but “don’t worry,” said a friend of Miguel’s, “just take the brecha heading south from El Realito and you’ll catch up with them.”

I see a certain hesitant look in Miguel’s eyes, which tells me he doesn’t really know the route we are going to take.

Every time I hear “no hay pierde,” I know there’s bound to be trouble, and sure enough, we found plenty of forks in the road. Fortunately, my friend Rodrigo has sharp eyes. At the first fork, he shouted, “Bear left, Miguel, I can see their tire tracks.”

This was repeated numerous times and all I can say is we were lucky Miguel’s friends happened to be the only ones driving around the Sierra Verde that morning.

At last we found them, eight guys enjoying a desayuno of sandwiches and refrescos in an oak grove whose leaves were just barely sprouting.